Adele Adkins jokingly refers to herself as a 'moany soul singer'. With her milky-soft complexion, feline sooty eyes and Sixties girl-group hairdo, the 19-year-old doesn't look much like a soul crooner. Nor, at least when she's talking, does she sound like one. She has a strong sing-song London accent and bursts into throaty guffaws, her gravelly timbre the result of a 20-a-day-fag habit. 'I love smoking, it's my favourite thing to do but I'm trying to give up,' she says, dolefully. 'I'm going to get hypnotised.'

Her voice, entirely free of artifice, is by turn rich and sensual, sinewy and low. Better still, it breaks vulnerably at the perfect instant. She accompanies herself old-style on piano or on a gently strummed acoustic guitar but writes thoroughly modern songs, in which she's cheated on by her bisexual boyfriend ('Daydeamer') and has gauzy daydreams about the city she grew up in ('Hometown Glory').

Adele spent her childhood in Tottenham and Brixton, wanting to be a heart surgeon or a fashion journalist before settling on the idea of pop stardom at 14, while listening to the Spice Girls, Puff Daddy and Destiny's Child ('We used to have sing-offs in the playground'). It was by chance, trying to impress her mates in the record shop jazz section, that she picked up the some Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald and was inspired to develop her own voice. But her style is rooted in the soul and R&B of her teens.

She left her local comprehensive for Croydon's Brit School (former pupils include Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse, and Leona Lewis) but she's the antithesis of Fame Academy fodder. 'It's a free performing arts school but you don't have to do jazz hands,' she says. 'I could just listen to music every day for four years.'

XL, home to the White Stripes and Dizzee Rascal, offered her a deal last year on the strength of only three songs and OMM tipped both her and Nash in our January 'Class of 2007' feature. Her album, 19 (due out early next year, part recorded by producer du jour Mark Ronson), was written at the tiny flat she shares with her mum in Tulse Hill. More specifically, it was penned at the kitchen table, in the brown leather chair she's sat in for our interview. It's about the joy and misery of being a young adult in love; filled with ardour, jealousy, infidelity and heartbreak. 'I've grown because I've been in love,' she says. 'I was a mummy's girl before but now I'm a lot more independent.'

She may be signed to XL but her first record will be a seven-inch single on her mate Jamie T's label. 'He was like, "But you promised I could put out 'Hometown' back in the day ..."' This track captures her essence: a slow burner that was written in 10 minutes after mum tried to persuade her to leave London for university. 'I played it to her as a protest song and said this is why I'm staying.'

· 'Hometown Glory' is out on 22 October on Pacemaker Recordings. Visit www.adele.tv to download a live version